MySQL select 10 random rows from 600K rows fast

Question

How can I best write a query that selects 10 rows randomly from a total of 600k?

Answer 1

All the best answers have been already posted (mainly those referencing the link http://jan.kneschke.de/projects/mysql/order-by-rand/).

I want to pinpoint another speed-up possibility - caching. Think of why you need to get random rows. Probably you want display some random post or random ad on a website. If you are getting 100 req/s, is it really needed that each visitor gets random rows? Usually it is completely fine to cache these X random rows for 1 second (or even 10 seconds). It doesn't matter if 100 unique visitors in the same 1 second get the same random posts, because the next second another 100 visitors will get different set of posts.

When using this caching you can use also some of the slower solution for getting the random data as it will be fetched from MySQL only once per second regardless of your req/s.